STAMFORD — Earl Kim said the city’s school district must assume a person is innocent until proven guilty.

True.

But the new superintendent needs to realize the district’s problems with AFB Construction Management and its CEO, Al Barbarotta, are broader and deeper than the possible extortion case being investigated by Stamford police and the FBI.

AFB has overseen maintenance and repairs of school buildings for 16 years, was the only bidder for the contract most of the time, and has been allowed enormous autonomy. School boards and superintendents’ offices over the years have deferred to AFB in many instances.

The school board voted last month to extend AFB’s contract until Nov. 1, instead of renewing it for an entire year as usual.

The private vendor is so entwined in the public school system, and has operated with so little oversight for so long, that the path to extricating his company is overrun with thorns.

That’s moreso now, in the middle of a federal investigation, when city attorneys have restricted school officials from speaking about AFB.

An expectation to ‘separate’

If Barbarotta “is guilty of whatever he’s alleged to have done,” Kim told The Advocate last week, “we would expect AFB to separate from the district.”

But no one seems to know what would then happen. School officials so far have no plan for how to operate without AFB.

That has been left to Kim, a Hawaii native who arrived in Stamford July 5 to a district struggling to recover from a series of scandals that began in 2014.

Among them: the arrest of a Stamford High teacher for having sex with a student; the arrests of two school administrators for failing to report it; criticism from a state prosecutor that district officials kept things secret to protect their reputations; the revelation of cases in which teachers suspected of harming students were quietly passed along; the superintendent’s decision to retire for lack of public trust; the FBI investigation into whether Barbarotta used his position as facilities director to win business with another contractor for the city.

Kim said the district formed a transition team to begin discussing how, and whether, management of school facilities should be restructured. Barbarotta, whose cellphone and computer were seized by Stamford police, is on the team as an adviser, Kim said.

The review, and possible restructure, could extend beyond Barbarotta’s Nov. 1 contract cut-off, Kim said. So AFB may remain in charge of Stamford school buildings for some time to come.

A question of leadership

The escalating problems with AFB have more to do with district leadership than AFB. School boards and superintendents failed to face questions about AFB’s performance as they arose.

In late 2013, for example, city attorneys wanted to know why AFB was allowed to ignore bidding regulations on a $424,000 energy-efficient lighting project at Scofield Magnet Middle School. It turned out the district finance director, superintendent and a school board member waived the regulations, allowing Barbarotta to choose whatever subcontractors he wanted.

Barbarotta said he wanted to make a model of the Scofield project. “If I can prove it here, I can sell it all over the state and I can make a lot of money,” Barbarotta told The Advocate in January 2014. School officials were fine with that.

Around the same time, city engineers questioned AFB’s energy-conservation claims for school buildings and hired an auditor to check. The auditor found faulty data and measurements that failed to meet industry standards. School officials not only accepted AFB’s claims, they paid AFB bonuses based on them. City attorneys put an end to the bonuses.

In 2013, the administration of then-Mayor Michael Pavia decided not to renew AFB’s contract to manage parks and city buildings. Bringing the functions in-house would save more than $200,000 a year and improve work quality, the administration found. School officials did not conduct a similar review.

No bidders

The Pavia administration cited a red flag — other companies had stopped bidding on the city contract. There was a question about whether AFB had too much of a say in the bid requirements, in effect keeping its competition out of the picture. Even though other companies were also not bidding on the Board of Education contract, school officials did not investigate.

When The Advocate revealed AFB had relationships with some of the subcontractors it hired, school officials said they left the choices up to AFB. One case involved AMC Environmental — a tenant in AFB’s Bridgeport headquarters at the time — that received 90 percent of the asbestos testing work in the district.

In 2014, school officials were fine with Board of Education member Richard Lyons, who headed the committee that oversaw AFB, stepping down to take a job with AFB. In fact, the superintendent recommended, and the school board approved, a 42 percent increase in AFB’s fee to cover Lyons’ $120,000 annual salary plus $42,000 benefits package.

School custodians reported during a Board of Education meeting last July that AFB regularly put off or ignored their requests for repairs. The custodians also said it was them — not AFB — who submitted work requests to school tradesmen and city engineers. The custodians said it was them — not AFB — who often obtained job estimates from outside contractors and completed bidding paperwork.

Some school members dismissed their reports as the complaints of disgruntled union workers. When two principals then told the board about long-unaddressed repairs in their buildings, the city — not AFB — rushed to complete the work last August before schools opened in the fall.

Where’s the watchdog?

Taxpayers, who have paid AFB about $20 million over the years, have bemoaned the lack of oversight.

Barbarotta, brought to Stamford by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy when he was mayor, has said he is one of Malloy’s closest friends. He has been a major bundler of campaign cash for Malloy. Cash was “bundled” when a number of AFB employees contributed at the same time. In Stamford, some say that is a reason AFB has operated unfettered.

The question for Kim and other school officials is whether they will tackle the problems, no matter what the FBI finds.